Karen- Thanks for sharing this. I particularly love this part of the post: "The natural sciences too have been damaged by intellectual stonewalling. They have proceeded without a fuller appreciation of their own roots--the material conditions that made the invention of science possible in the modern age, the moral responsibility they bore for the outcomes of their work, the inescapable limits of human knowledge, the critical importance of non-quantitative data, much of it buried in archives or images, which historians knew well and might have supplied."---I think it's a great reminder that there is so much more work to be done. :)
It's so frustrating that we talk about interdisciplinary scholarship and yet don't practice it. Historians have so much to offer. And the arts and literature do as well. I remember talking to an anthropologist about all the ethnographic detail to be found in novels - I was thinking of Thomas Hardy and his depictions of rural life, but I've recently been reading George Eliot and she also has loads of detail of the kind anthropologists look for. And no doubt the same is true of literature around the world.
Karen- Thanks for sharing this. I particularly love this part of the post: "The natural sciences too have been damaged by intellectual stonewalling. They have proceeded without a fuller appreciation of their own roots--the material conditions that made the invention of science possible in the modern age, the moral responsibility they bore for the outcomes of their work, the inescapable limits of human knowledge, the critical importance of non-quantitative data, much of it buried in archives or images, which historians knew well and might have supplied."---I think it's a great reminder that there is so much more work to be done. :)
It's so frustrating that we talk about interdisciplinary scholarship and yet don't practice it. Historians have so much to offer. And the arts and literature do as well. I remember talking to an anthropologist about all the ethnographic detail to be found in novels - I was thinking of Thomas Hardy and his depictions of rural life, but I've recently been reading George Eliot and she also has loads of detail of the kind anthropologists look for. And no doubt the same is true of literature around the world.